Date of Award

1-1-2012

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Jerel Rosati

Abstract

Postcolonial and constructivist concepts can be applied in order to investigate how women's traditional sociopolitical agency in Mali and the Pilipinas has been impacted by colonization. The effects of colonization on women are something that traditional International Relations theories have not examined. Both postcolonial theory and constructivism have an ontological premise of `becoming', or world as changing, which is demonstrated by how each approach views identities as socially constructed historical conditions. Employment of theoretical concepts from both theories can aid in analyzing identities as constructs that are time specific, that create and influence, and are in turn created by historical conditions. These concepts, notions of hybridity and other, and the idea of resistance in postcolonial theory allow for the investigation of an agency/structure dialectic, or in this study, examining how women's traditional sociopolitical agency was shaped by the colonial experience. This allows for examination of the social constructs regarding colonial women and their agency within the social constructs of rules and norms which are institutionalized, either formally or informally, and which in turn influence identities. Furthermore, the postcolonial idea of resistance has implications for the notions of rules, institutions and material conditions found within constructivism as mechanisms

DISS_para>for possibilities of change regarding women in Mali and the Pilipinas. These theoretical concepts are applied in this study to help understand how women's actions in the realms of general and reproductive health, religion/spirituality, education, economics, and as traditional healers have been shaped through colonization and decolonization.

Rights

© 2012, Jennifer Almeda

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